“My Therapist Sez,” the first poem in the collection, is a sequence, as a sonnet crown is a sequence, and I want a word for it: a garland of stanzas; a florilegium of prose. The humor has an are-you-seeing-what-I’m-seeing vibe, wherein the speaker acknowledges that the folks who are supposed to be at the wheel are, it turns out, unfit to drive: “My therapist reiterates that her orgasms are a God experience. I congratulate / her with my eyes, I think.”

After therapeutic disaster after disaster, they find themselves alone in their weedy garden, teeming with life, unable to connect. From “My Therapist Sez”:

The weeds tangle above my
knees, and the maple tree branches droop from the burden of their blossoms. It’s
early April. Dust from the traffic rolls over the grass and settles in the glow of sun.
Frogs start to sing, but I am unable to picture tomorrow or tomorrow or tomorrow.

In “TV,” the black and white images of the news and other worldly mayhem do not affect the speaker until they move their armchair or switch channels. The prose poem is itself a box; the language is stiff, almost instructional. Equilibrium is maintained in the flatness; only disruption leads to art, says the speaker, but it’s the emotional flatness and lack of hierarchy of meaning that creates the poetry: “A tube of Crest falling through an ethereal sky has about the same impact as the latest plane crash on the six o’clock news.”

The poet proposes, beautifully, that childhood itself is a queer space, ideally unbeholden to conformity, though most often oppressed by it. In “Dinner at the Bradys’,” sisters jump through the screen to escape the neglect and monotony of their strictly vegan household to wolf down pork chops with the carnivorous tv clan: “We ask for raw hamburger for dessert / And sometimes we get it.” 

With glistening fealty to childhood memory, “The Fall of Toby and Lady” lays a series of vignettes like Polaroids on a bedspread, capturing the mix of confusion and emotional clarity brought on by presumed commonplace moments of death and sex in rural life, such as when the speaker’s dog, Toby, “eviscerate[s] one of [the] chickens in our yard.” Goats take on a mystical symbolism, expressed with cut glass clarity:

They destroyed
things because, like men, the world belonged to them. And like men, / people
loved them anyway.

Violence, impending or historical, is not merely an event in these poems, but in the atmosphere. From “To the Girl my Creepy Uncle Wanted Me to ‘Do’ When I was 15”: “the moon / devours sound         is a one-eyed man             always watching.” 

The queerness of the child surfaces in the non-dissolution of their own truth in the face of societal pressure: People in power—a teacher—will try to shame the purple out of a child. They may ruin purple for the child, but the poet won’t lie about the child’s impulse toward purple, and will not deny them their vision. 

“Sister Story” lulls the reader with its form, a kitchen table recap of a fractured branch of family tree, carrying momentum like an open secret until the last line and its testament to witness is pulled so taut and so steep, it takes one’s breath away. 

The time machine mechanics of “Kim” present an endlessly mutable story with an irrefutable ending. Alternative scenarios of the violent death of a friend keep multiplying to become every past and future incident of so-called accidental brutality against women. 

Mutability of time and narrative continues in “Friday, Saturday,” a piecing-together of a timeline for a girlfriend’s suicide amid the cacophony of domestic violence in the apartment next door:

“You have not yet killed yourself but are missing…You are missing but not dead…It’s Friday or Saturday and you are dead or almost dead and people are fighting and your neighbor is about to be dead.” The poem begins, “There are two stories or maybe more”—not two sides, but stories—multiple ways of remembering and telling.

There is a self-awareness to these poems that is unique to a certain kind of comedy—a cognitive dissonance that evokes both anxiety and a laugh. From “Ten Things to Remember ‘Bout Me When I’m Dead”:

You might have to
work a bit—look at the table of contents, not the spine. I’ll surprise
you maybe.

And we’re back to the bird’s side-eye view, askance 90 degrees to the rigid grid of straight, monochromatic fascism and its attendant violence. Those birds are placed, but not settled; what is familiar is still not quite home, and they are playing a long game with no opt-out. Stability is living on the floor. But oh, to clutch, catawampus, to an air-tossed wire, as these fly poems do, and sing. 

Cover art for Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect features inky birds perched wing-to-wing on a wire, perpendicular to the ground of the book, stretched vertically between two toppled telephone poles—the perspective of someone lying on the ground, themselves toppled and looking up. The figures are so commonplace as to be invisible, but a shift of perspective upsets expectation, and therein lies the humor in the art: The image is a cognitive dissonance of birds; this book is a murder of poems. It was, too, a finalist for the 2025 Lambda Lammy Poetry Awards.

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